As business evolves, methodologies evolve with it. The Scrum Guide is akin to a business Bible in many agile circles, but unlike the Bible, the Scrum Guide gets occasional updates. In a Q&A at InfoQ, Ben Linders interviews scrum co-creators Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland about the changes to the newest version of the Scrum Guide. Beyond Revelation Here are the biggest updates to the Scrum Guide, straight from Schwaber: There are five main changes …

Although the Agile Manifesto and its principles are the foundation for everything else in the agile world, it might be hard to get the average employee stuck in a training seminar to care about them. That means trainers and coaches need to step up their efforts to make it engaging. In an article for Agile Alliance, Kimberly Poremski discusses the use of “pocket-sized principles” to more effectively convey the meaning and value of Agile Manifesto …

Agile was a thing 10 years ago, but it was nothing compared to what it has become now. When you stop and contemplate the differences, you might develop a deeper appreciation of how far it has come. In an article for Application Development Trends, Mark J. Balbes touches upon some of the biggest changes in agile that he has seen over the last decade. Evolution of the Craft Whereas most organizational discussions used to be …

We learn a lot from our mistakes, so people have begun to wonder if it is possible to learn from mistakes we have not even made yet. “Premortems” and the like have arisen from this, where people try to imagine in advance the many ways that a project may fail. A similar strategy could be of benefit in implementing agile. In an article for CIO magazine, John Edwards offers seven straightforward ways to fail at …

In an article for Scrum Alliance, Christopher Lewis compares scrum masters to sports coaches and product owners to star players. The product owner is a star player by defining the product. The scrum master is the coach who helps the product owner shine. In many cases, great coaches are former players themselves. Here is what that means for an agile project. The Master/Owner Relationship Both the scrum master and product owner derive their power from …

Excitement and anxiety are two sides of the same coin, and you are bound to experience both when you go agile. In fact, there are some particular parts of agile adoption known for making people nervous. In a post at Mountain Goat Software, Mike Cohn discusses five things that spook agile teams out: Agile has no design phase. There is a misconception that you have to become a generalist. There is a danger that planning …

McKinsey defines organizational agility as “the ability to quickly reconfigure strategy, structure, processes, people, and technology toward value-creating and value-protecting opportunities.” That sounds awesome. Now, how the heck do you achieve it? Luckily, they have some answers there too. Karin Ahlbäck, Clemens Fahrbach, Monica Murarka, and Olli Salo present McKinsey research that offers starting points toward unlocking agility. Three Roads to Agility The “good” news for you is that not many organizations are actually capturing …

Quality assurance (QA) is the job that never ends, and identifying bugs is just one part of the job. In fact, QA is so important that it can benefit from some uniform structure. In an article for AgileConnection, Praveena Ramakrishnan discusses some smart practices for a reliable and structured QA process: Review design and architectural documents. Research past defects. Triage the defects. Go beyond the reported issue. Defect Disposal You could just dive straight into …

Software developer Kannan Chandrasegaran asks us to think of software applications as onions: There are always multiple layers to their complexity. Lack of appreciation for these layers can be one way that project requirements balloon way beyond expectations. In a post for The Startup, Chandrasegaran explore this phenomenon in depth and at length. Complex by Design He begins with an example for a hypothetical app that helps people buy and sell books. At the very …

What does a tester do when there is not enough to test? What does a programmer do when the programming is done for the sprint? These are serious, difficult questions for new, immature teams. In a post for Mountain Goat Software, Mike Cohn shares strategies that will remove these problems from affecting your team in the first place. Genuine Collaboration The wrong way to collaborate on user stories is for a programmer to totally whip …